Silent Data Corruption in SATA Arrays: A Solution

Recent large academic studies have identified the surprising frequency of silent read failures that are not identified or resolved in enterprise SATA disk arrays despite the typical integrity functions. Such errors result in corrupt data being provided by the disk array to the application without any notification or warning, potentially leading to erroneous operations and results. This "Silent data corruption" includes misdirected writes, partial writes, and data path corruption with evidence pointing to the errors being uncaught in 1 in 90 drives. By using an extended data integrity feature, silent data corruption can be identified and handled so that corrupt data is not sent to the application. Furthermore, data that otherwise would be lost can be recovered.